S ECULARIZED T RANSCENDENCE

Given the conceptual outcome arrived at in the last paragraph, we should now specify and clarify the Mediterranean legacy in the concept of sovereignty with a reading of the relationship between legal-political power and conceptual transcendence. As Bertrand de Jouvenel has written, there is nothing less natural than that concentration of authority that makes

authority distant and invisible.18 A certain aptitude for the mystical

that has historically been weak in the West is needed to grasp the relevance of this concentration; or failing that, the clear presence of a dash of belief in the holy. Indeed, the mix of Eastern traditions of the sacred core of political power with the proto-secularized understanding of authority typical of Greek and Roman culture may be seen as one of the cultural conditions for possibility for the vast process of political unification effected by the establishment of the state in modernity.

From this perspective, early modern literary descriptions of political power are significant. The political and existential representation of the sovereign found in Rosencrantz’s speech in

Act III, Scene iii, of Shakespeare’s Hamlet seems to indicate a

proto-modern centrality of the sovereign, of his soul in relation to the world around him. Like “a massy wheel / Fix’d on the summit of the highest mount / To whose huge spokes ten thousand lesser things / Are mortis’d and adjoin’d,” he is at the center of everything and has innumerable people attached to him, their

destinies attached to his destiny.19 The fall of the sovereign is the

fall of a world. This use of the form of the wheel and of the idea of the center as represented in the sovereign’s soul points to the unifying capacity of sovereignty when viewed, in modernity, as the locus of political unity.

The persistence of the symbolism of the center of the world, then, is highly relevant to an understanding of the modern face of the sociopolitical, within which the concept of sovereignty is framed. But how are we to understand the meaning of this

18. BERTRAND DE JOUVENEL,DE LA SOUVERAINETÉ (Genin, Paris, 1955). 19. WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, HAMLET, PRINCE OF DENMARK, act III, sc. III, (1600-1602).

persistence? How are we to understand this symbolism, given the cultural horizons of an age that has emerged out of a gradual process of secularization? Perhaps we need to recall the cultural and philosophical core meaning of the concept of sovereignty as it appeared in the era of the Peace of Westphalia and in the theories of Bodin and, above all, Hobbes.

The point is to grasp that, from a conceptual perspective, the logic that governs processes of political sacralization expresses the institution of a difference, of a distinguishing feature. On one hand, the process of legitimizing political authority in modernity is founded on the gradual establishment of a self-sufficient

humanism;20 on the other hand, it emphasizes the need to institute

a new order: an artificial order built by human beings as a creation

ex nihilo. But as we have seen, the institution of an order is the institution of a difference in relation to the previous chaotic and profane space. The logic of modern sovereignty, then, is the logic of an instituted difference. The sovereign state establishes borders, that is, signs of difference from other profane states. The state is established through the consecration of a territory, its inhabitants, and their form of life.

But this institution is guaranteed, within the conceptual structure of sovereignty, by openness to a secularized transcendence: that is, the transcendence of a sovereign subject who has been instituted as different among equals, as a supreme being in comparison with inferior others, but above all as the locus of the authority that transcends all concrete social relationships. This is an authority that relies on the conceptual model of subjectivity as the mask to which is attributed the unity of the institution as the reflex of the ideal unity of the multitude; and this applies to both the monarch’s mask and the people’s mask. Thus the secularized transcendence of sovereignty issues from the long- term impersonality of the center of legal and political attribution in which it is embodied.

The plenitudo potestatis, as potestas directa, is the technical outcome of this conceptual transcendence. More precisely, it is the form that the sovereign, as representative of

20. For a description of this concept, see CHARLES TAYLOR,ASECULAR

unity, must acquire in order to make visible the empirically absent

unity in the multitude. The peculiar potestas of the sovereign,

being the acting representation of a subject who is one because he transcends all parties, all singularities, guarantees the transition from the fragmented multitude of the state of nature to the person- multitude that is a people. Thus symbolically the sovereign must represent himself as an entity that tries to make immanent, by virtue of the absoluteness of his power and his decisions, what is in fact designed to remain transcendent: the pure ideal source of unity. The continuous attempt to render this ideal earthly is the regulatory principle of secularized transcendence as embodied in the modern concept of sovereignty. The process of secularization consists, then, of just this attempt, never totally successful, to bring

unity to the world.21 But the attempt is conceptually destined to

partly fail because that unity in se stands outside the world; it

consists precisely of the perspective of the ideal standing above the material many.

This dynamic helps account for the clear and deep traces of the pre-modern evident in the visible royal acts engaged in by several modern monarchies. At least until the French Revolution, the king could rely on the argument of the divine nature of his person, for example by pointing to his anointment at Reims; and this attitude was illustrated by his self-attribution of special powers (the Sun King proclaiming his own high and dazzling light). When

Louis XIV said l’État c’est moi, he was expressing as well his

awareness of being a material supreme subject who embodied the primacy of an authority beyond actual social relationships. Consistently with one strand of the Mediterranean legacy, and thus with the Eastern culture of political power, he affirmed a

conception of the sovereign as directly containing the transcendent

supremacy of an absolute center of power (direct representation). Sovereignty is embodied in the monarch’s body. We see here the attempt to delineate a subject that directly represents transcendence through the attempt to materialize ideal unity. This is not a third transcendent king evoked by the sovereign, but rather a presumed direct earthly-making of the unity in the king’s body.

21. See GIUSEPPE DUSO,LA LOGICA DEL POTERE.STORIA CONCETTUALE

At the same time, however, sovereign power represents itself as articulating, under various configurations, the medieval

theory of the king’s two bodies.22 The monarch’s physical body,

which, like every body, is destined to suffer disease and decay, is associated with, and not distinguished from, the institutional and impersonal political body of a king who, as a power, as the center of the world, is immortal. The traditional formula adopted

following the accession of a new sovereign, le Roi est mort, vive le

Roi, is something like the emblem of the coexisting conception of

secularized transcendence that seems to be largely associated, at least until the advent of the Byzantine Empire, with the Greek and

Roman tradition of the impersonal nature of the supreme power.23

As Ernst Jünger has written,24 this formula implies a third extra-

temporal king, and both the dead king and the living one are images of that king. They are like bodies that wear the mask of this third totally transcendent king who is the supreme center of attribution of legal, political, and social life within the state. Thus we have here, coexisting with the previous theory, a conception of

the sovereign as strictly representing the supreme power and

therefore as representing the original and transcendent source of absolute power (indirect representation). Indeed, the king’s physical death makes clear the impossibility of an immanent unity.

The true sovereign is the third, extra-temporal, king and thus the

indirect theory expresses the awareness of the irreducible distance between the physical unity of a person and the unity in a multitude. The latter is just an idea, but an idea with tremendous concreteness. This coexisting conception reminds us that the attempt to give unity earthly form is destined to fail; but this reference to unity as a third transcendent idea is understandable precisely because of the experience of many failures as part of the pretence of making unity earthly.

22. The best known overview of this theory is provided by ERNST H. KANTOROWICZ, THE KING'S TWO BODIES: A STUDY IN MEDIEVAL POLITICAL

THEOLOGY (Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1957).

23. For a groundbreaking interpretation of the formula “Le roi est mort,

vive le roi” see RALPH E.GIESEY, LE ROI NE MEURT JAMAIS:LES OBSÈQUES

ROYALES DANS LA FRANCE DE LA RENAISSANCE (Flammarion, Paris, 1987).

24. See Ernst Jünger, Der gordische Knoten, in 7 SÄMTLICHE WERKE

The center of attribution that I have now referred to several times would appear to be, then, the conceptual condition for thinking about the social bond and unity-in-difference in a secularized context. As has been implied, the structure here described has remained substantially unchanged even within the conceptual model of popular sovereignty that begins with Rousseau’s theory of democracy, and even taking into account Rousseau’s notorious aversion to representative democracy. The twofold conception of secularized transcendence in modern

sovereignty as simultaneously representing directly and

representing indirectly supreme and absolute power is manifestly a Mediterranean legacy and the expression of a dialectic that enables the state to perform its regulatory function. This dialectic has, indeed, a normative nature, since it is what to a certain extent has allowed, until the present-day crisis of sovereignty, for the guarantee of a movement towards the impersonality and stability of the institution as a condition for the regulation of contingent aspects of social life.

In fact, especially in the initial stages of the trajectory of change traced by the concept of sovereignty, the reference to the transcendent as embodied in the figure of the sovereign ensured that the project of a secularized unification received driving and legitimizing force. The unity of the supreme center implied the uniqueness of the source of law, with law viewed as the expression of the sovereign’s will, thereby guaranteeing the legitimization of positive law without structural reference to classical or explicitly theological forms of justification. Subsequently, the gradual unfolding of the process of secularization allowed for the emergence of an idea of transcendent sovereignty standing high above all other things: no longer embodied in the figure of the sovereign, but rather mainly represented in his person. In this way, the process of secularization gave rise to an idea more familiar to us, that of sovereignty as a supreme and depersonalized institution. What is really at issue in the Mediterranean legacy present in the concept of sovereignty, in the twofold form of conceptual transcendence that I have tried to describe, is the establishment of a dimension of institutional sovereignty, that is, the establishment of the impersonal legal-political condition for the unification of a secularized but not desacralized society.

On this reading, the present crisis of socio-legal unification found at the level of both states and supranational entities is also a kind of crisis of the very idea of conceptual transcendence that has been associated with the concept of sovereignty. In his celebrated

introduction to Leviathan, Hobbes conceives of sovereignty as the

artificial soul of the State, thereby implying it constitutes the immaterial core of supreme power. He seems also to have had clearly in mind the Mediterranean legacy that has been discussed in this paper, in particular as embodied in the Byzantine idea of the

emperor as imitation of God. In Chapter XVII of Leviathan,

Hobbes writes, after describing the social covenant: “This is the generation of that great LEVIATHAN, or rather (to speak more

reverently) of that Mortal God, to which we owe under the

Immortal God, our peace and defence.”25 Thus, the Hobbesian

covenant is also an act of faith. It expresses the rational process that leads subjects to have faith in their sovereign as the one able to protect them but also as the one who embodies, in his decisions and his representative actions, the unity of the state, the unity of the many.

VI.CONCLUSION

Could there be something in the structure of secularized transcendence that we have no choice but to come to terms with if our aim is the socio-political unification of individuals in a context of pluralism and great diversity? Is the radical horizontality of institutional relationships found in the various contemporary models of governance really suited to the establishment of a social bond?

On this score, it is worth remembering Immanuel Kant’s observations on the nature of the social contract. According to Kant, the indisputable practical reality of the social contract, as an idea of reason and as a keystone by which to measure the legitimacy of every public law, consists in the obligation on the

25. HOBBES,supra note 13, at 114;see ALOYSIUS P.MARTINICH,THE TWO

GODS OF LEVIATHAN (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1992) (For an

interesting interpretation, within Hobbesian studies, of the relationship between politics and transcendence).

legislator to enact laws in such a way that they could have been

produced by the united will of a people.26

But the united will of a people is not an empirical fact discernible through opinion polls, referenda, or elections. It is, rather, a rational ideal that can be concretely grasped in the form of the duty of civil union, the duty of life together regulated by law.

The instantiation par excellence of the public good is the civil

constitution of a social union that guarantees everyone freedom by

means of laws. Thus the truly general interest of a polity is an a

priori that precedes any recognition of consent. It is the idea that allows us to stay together, guaranteeing that nothing has been decided for a people if that same people could never have rationally reached the very same decision on its own.

The general interest cannot, then, be the product of the aggregation of particular interests. The generality of the interest must be established and understood on a different level, one that transcends the logic of balance, of compromises, of negotiations. Indeed, without the assumption of a general interest so conceived, potential negotiations consistent with the democratic rule of law are not conceptually possible. Thus the general interest is the

supreme investment in the salus publica; it is the investment in a

regulated civil life that derives from a foundational and constitutional covenant. It coincides with the “prospect” of a (never totally) secularized transcendence embodied in the modern sovereignty of the people.

Modern democracy, in the form of power of the people and government by the people symbolically conceived, finds a condition for its possibility in the conceivability of the general interest, because a people as a synthetic unity finds conceptual consistency precisely in the representative form of the general interest. From this perspective, a people should be conceived of as the rational outcome of a way of thinking of political unity that presupposes a multitude of subjects. This way of thinking unity seeks unceasingly to bring to reality, to make immanent, the unity and the existence of a people. We need only consider all the

26. See Immanuel Kant, Über den Gemeinspruch: Das mag in der Theorie

richtig sein, taugt aber nicht für die Praxis, XXIIBERLINER MONATSSCHRIFT,

attempts to render the direct will of the people empirically visible through referenda and deliberation and the fact that these attempts never seem to pin down unity in a material way and make it possible to perceive a people as one sole thing.

At the end of the day, what I hope can be grasped from the path pursued in this text is the pregnant historical-conceptual nature of the notion of sovereignty. Assuredly it is a modern concept, but within its structure of meaning a specific theoretical tradition about supreme political power has been absorbed and has evolved in line with modern conditions. The Mediterranean legacy bequeathed to the concept of sovereignty through the mutually enriching interactions between the Greek, Egyptian, and Persian cultures of power, and manifested in the mixture that constituted the principle of the topmost political subject in the Byzantine Empire, has clearly been incorporated into the founding ideas of political representation. In this model, representation always comes from the top, from the openness to transcendence that sacralizes the polity that constitutes representation. Modern political representation similarly comes from the top, from the ideal dimension of unity that cannot be discerned in the empirical multitude.

The major modern difference resides in certain foundational assumptions about the representation of unity. In modernity, the rational foundation emerges from the bottom, from the convergent wills of rational agents, naturally equal, free, autonomous, and independent. But at the same time, since the sum of particular wills is different from the will of a people, and since the will of a unitarian people is the sole requirement for the modern legitimization of power, openness to a “conceptual top,” where the idea of unity is visible, becomes inescapable even for modernity. This bottom/top dialectic seems thus to capture the movement of the concept of sovereignty in modernity; but I would argue that this movement appears to have been triggered by the long and venerable tradition of political power in Mediterranean culture.